North Dakota's governor took the position that qualified volunteers instead of paid sharpshooters should be allowed to kill elk in Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the highest level of the National Park Service Monday.

The state wants the park to let sportsmen and women participate in killing as many as 1,000 elk, when the park begins an elk population reduction program starting in 2008.

The park has said it can't allow any form of public hunting without congressional action and Gov. John Hoeven asked Interior Department Secretary Dirk Kempthorn to intervene.

Hoeven said he got an assurance from the interior secretary that he will look into the matter.

Park superintendent Valerie Naylor said she's already asked park officials to clarify whether qualified volunteers fit the definition of a sharpshooter.

In any case, using volunteers as sharpshooters would require that they be closely controlled, accompanied by park staff, told sex and other characteristics of the animal to kill and the elk meat would be donated to charity, Naylor said.

She said those conditions are used for sharpshooters in other park management actions and qualified volunteers would have a much different experience than a typical hunt.

She said she expects to get some clarification on the matter in a relatively short time, based on her request and the governor's personal interest.

The State Game and Fish Department withdrew as a cooperating agency in protest when the park said it is not including any form of public hunting among the several environmental assessment alternatives in consideration.

Those alternatives include paying sharpshooters, euthanasia, fertility controls and possibly transferring the animals elsewhere.

Game and Fish wildlife chief Randy Kreil says the agency could closely manage volunteer hunters over the course of several seasons, saving the park the expense of sharpshooters and helicopters to take away the elk carcasses.

Naylor said it's still not certain that the final decision will involve any form of killing and hunting by sharpshooters, whether or not they include volunteer sportsmen.

Alternately, the park may use helicopters to push the elk into holding corrals for killing, processing and meat distribution to food banks and charities. It also is looking at killing and testing enough elk to insure there is no chronic wasting disease among the survivors and then transferring them.

That possibility would mean a moratorium against transferring elk has been lifted. It was that moratorium that got the park into elk trouble in the first place, with a healthy population outgrowing park space and habitat.

The park has room for about 400 elk. The population is double that now and growing by 25 percent every year.

Naylor said the park has a lot of "publics" to satisfy on the elk question. She said the park's draft environmental assessment will be released in the fall and the public will have a chance to comment on it then.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 1-888-303-5511, or lauren@westriv.com.)